one phrase:
“you have failed me for the last time..”

on thursday i had an anxiety attack. it was hardcore, and i’m not sure what triggered it. i tried calling my OB/GYN and (once again) they wouldn’t even talk to me.. they’ve done this before, in march when one my my ovarian cysts ruptured and i needed help managing the pain their staff said “well, we can’t do anything for you, but we’re booking for may…” this time it was “sorry, but we’re booking for july, come see us then.” fuck them. so much for integrity and trust, especially with people who have a file regarding this stuff on me already, all they had to do was look it up in the damn file and call me in a prescription.

it’s resolved now. i had to go into an urgent treatment center and get some valium to calm me down. 2 pills, that’s all i fucking needed. back in march i had to depend on mupppet’s dad’s friend to call me in something for the pain 9 at night. wtf is the western medical establishment coming to?

well, yesterday wasn’t nearly as dramatic. in fact it all worked out quite well today. here’s the backstory.. my vacuum. oh, god. a 5 year old eureka, i’ve been using it every day for some time now to keep the bugs at bay (we have carpet beetles this year). yesterday was catbox cleaning day and i had an…er.. chemical spill. too much to sweep up, and just as well because i don’t want to smear cat-piss filled litter into the parquet in the dining room, so naturally i attach the hose to the eureka and suck it up, do the deed, put the hose attachment back, then change the vacuum bag. when i changed the bag one of the clips that secures the bag to the machine intake broke, but it was still a tight fit.

no biggie, right? that’s what i thought. i’ve used machines in worse condition.

until later that evening i noticed when i was doing my vacuum routine in the living room that it was spitting particles out the back instead of picking them up (bread crumbs, etc from the girls’ daily habits), not to mention a few days ago when a screw fell out of the machine from somewhere (!), and i know it was a machine screw because the assembly screws are Philips and this one was flathead. but i digress…

so anyway, i’m doing my vacuuming last night, noticing it’s not picking up like it should, and then something hits my olfactory sense with the power of a putrid skunk dead on the side of the road. a sort of burning, death-like, cooked cat piss type smell.

i looked at muppet, and soon he smelled it too. ‘this machine is trying to kill me!’ i thought. but where did we go wrong? i’ve always made sure it had good belts, a clean bag, and up until recently i didn’t do much serious work. we’ve done the cat-litter recon many times before. what the hell happened? all of this going through my mind as i sputtered and gagged. “take that thing outside!” muppet cried. so i did. then i opened a window, sprayed air freshener and turned on the room’s fan. this was seriously worse than the trash bin, in the words of one of muppet’s friends: “dude, that is MOST foul.”

today i was inspecting it on the porch, no blockages, the belt was a little worn, but not in need of a change, there was about 1/4″ of brush left on the brush roller (there had been 1/2″ a mere year ago). i didn’t turn it on, another toxic blast would surely kill me. i think it’s time to retire this machine to the garage, where it can forever be a hose-only shop vac.

i convinced first myself, then muppet that i needed a new vacuum. but not just any ol’ hoover…. it needed to be the Dyson DC-07. muppet’s wallet began to shriek “oh no! oh god! the pain! it huuurts! make her stop, muppet!”

nevertheless, 400$ later i came home and vacuumed the very living room i’ve been vacuuming every day for months. you would not believe the amount of dirt and hair i got out of the carpet. apparently, besides never losing suction, the DC-07 also blows air into the carpet to push deep dirt up and then sucks it out. niiiiice. likewise for the upstairs carpet and stairs. i think that this will be an allergy-changing event in this house. bless you James Dyson. and your sweet-ass inventions.

i mused on the way to the store whether James Dyson in the vacuum industry is like Sub-Pop records is in with, say, Atlantic and CBS. does he have groupies? bodyguards? when he goes places do women flash their breasts at him and say “woooo! your vacuums RAWK!”

he should.

(i’ve been sick the last few days, so i’ve not had any energy to blog.. or do anything. i’m creeping up on the Mend, so it’s blog time!)

ayuh, that’s what i mean.

after years of trying to get my hair to grow in blue or fire-red (which it stubbornly refused to do), and when i was preparing for yet another dye touch-up job i noticed this time around that if i were to bleach and dye one more time (even just the roots, because you can’t be too precise with bleach applications..) that my hair would break off and fall out! even Cholesterol can only repair so much!

i carefully examined my poor hair and came up with three possible solutions: i could say ‘the hell with it’ and do this dye job again, tempt the Fates and probably have to shave the remainder of my hair off afterward; i could do what i’ve done in the past and dye it all black; i could say ‘the hell with it’ and find a close match to my natural hair color and dye it such, then let my hair grow out some more for future abuse. i chose the third option.

but what did my natural hair color look like? it’s been quite a long time since i’ve seen it. i dug through some pictures from time gone by to get an idea of what i was getting into. chocolate brown! PLAH!

nevertheless, after purchasing some color that was as close to the real thing as i could, it’s done. only a hint of red shows through the brown-ness that is the current color. my natural color. observe:

now that i have been a rainbow of haircolors, in retrospect neither of them have more fun than the others. blondes, red-heads, brunettes, blu-ettes… maybe i’m just a boring person. the only time i was given more attention out in public was when i had bigger breasts, that seems to have nothing to do with hair color.

AAAANYWAY… until i get a picture of the new styl-ee, here’s a random from the old school:
12|1|2

today, i salute you, Mr. Shopping Cart Safety Advisor..
(Mr. Shopping Cart Safety Advisor!)
now that you’re past retirement age, your appointed task is to let all mothers of multiples know of the perils of allowing their children to ride in the basket of a shopping cart.
(there could be rocks, you know!)
you don’t know where the second child should go, all you know is you’re saving children all over the market from being victims of random rocks that supermarket staff places all over the store.
(their mothers should thank me…)
so today crack open a Bud Light, and enjoy knowing you’ve made an otherwise good Thursday go to hell for one more mother, you crotchety old bastard.
(Mr. Shopping Cart Safety Advisor….)

fyi: this is true. some old fart came to me yesterday telling me that i shouldn’t let my kids ride in the basket because if i hit a rock they’ll go out on their heads. i basically (minus the profanities) told him “okay, Dudley Do-Right, you tell me where the other child should go..” and he got all blubbery “well, i don’t know, but..” so i said this to him “well, let me give YOU some advice now: mothers don’t appreciate strange old bastards telling them how to care for their children.”

i’ve been fuming about this for a whole day now. wtf? what got me was that he told ME this, like i had some better option. there were plenty of other women who had just one child doing the same thing. but yeah, the rocks…. in a supermarket. give me a fucking break.

some people. gad.

you know, it’s getting reaaaaally hard for people like us to keep positive and still try to be well-informed about this country’s current direction. it seems like every few days or so (roughly when i’m able to sit and read some news) i get this feeling like i should be outside pointing at the falling sky and screaming. or worse: covering my eyes and ears, assuming the Duck and Cover pose.

take this article for example. it’s stuff that i’ve already read, but it got rehashed today for some reason that escapes me… oh right, Chesterfield County, Va. has established that their ‘favored religion’ would be Judeo-Christianity, and a federal ruling upheld it! don’t believe me? here’s the link:

http://www.fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2005/052005/05092005/1758588

but anyway, as i was saying…… screaming and pointing at the sky, yes…

i’ve already seen this article once, and the first time around i took a more skeptical route. now it’s just not funny anymore. here’s a quote:

“Jim Jones’s history holds the answer. He not only proved the obvious fact that people are blinded by their religious beliefs and will only impute goodness, mercy, and religious motivations to their leader, but Jim Jones proved the efficacy of the basic teaching of Machiavelli: a leader must only appear to have the qualities of goodness—he need not actually possess those attributes.”

and here’s the link:

http://www.yuricareport.com/Dominionism/TheDespoilingOfAmerica.htm

the article’s image was spankingly funny when i first read it. now i’m afraid that people have taken it serious, and maybe even printed a few Holy Cards?

yep. it’s falling.

but for what it’s worth, now that i’ve already posted this entry… i was always under the impression that when Machiavelli wrote The Prince it was a scathing satire; a textbook on How Not To Be. sometimes disclaimers are a Good Thing. i also wager that when The Prince was written it was too far-fetched to truly be taken seriously, have we all lost our sense of humor…or common sense? now poor Machiavelli has a stain on his name, all because some people don’t have a pulse.

well, two years and a month.

http://www.bushflash.com/y2.html